But First, Coffee
Published 3 Dec 2017Want some tips for wrapping your Christmas presents? Struggling to wrap all your gifts? My life hacks for wrapping are gunna change yo life! Learn how to use the diagonal wrapping method to use less wrapping paper, make a pillow box out of a toilet paper tube, and more!
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December 24, 2023
Life-Changing Gift Wrapping Hacks
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December 23, 2023
QotD: Multitasking
I think it’s probably true that everyone multitasks more than they used to, and some of us multitask virtually all our waking hours.
In short, we are all teenagers now. This was one of marketing research revelations of the 1990s: that teens could watch TV, take a phone call, do their home work, monitor a conversation in the other room, and ignore their parents all at the same time. But some 10 years later, it looks like kids were merely the early adopters.
Grant McCracken, “We are all teenagers now”, This Blog Sits at the, 2005-05-24.
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March 16, 2023
QotD: “In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong”
One day, I arrived on the ward to discover an enthusiastic self-expresser in the first bed. Her two-inch-long nails were painted lime green, and looked as if they gave off the kind of radiation that meant instant leukaemia. That, however, was the least of it.
She was lying in the bed, décolleté, to reveal breasts pierced with many metal bars ending in steel balls to keep them in place, and for what is known round here as decoration. I couldn’t look at them without wincing; ex-President Clinton would no doubt have felt her pain. As for her face, it was the modern equivalent of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. It was also the refutation of the doctrine that the customer is always the right. In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong.
She had a ring through the septum of her nose, and a ring through her upper lip, so that the two clacked when she spoke. She had a stud in her tongue, and two studs through her lower lip. She had so many rings through her ears that they looked like solenoids. She had a metal bar through the bridge of her nose and rings at the outer edges of her eyebrows. If she were to die, she could probably be sold to a scrap metal merchant.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Lady of the Rings”, Asian Age, 2005-12-27.
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February 24, 2023
You may call it “interest cycling”, but I call it “normality”
Tom Knighton on what is apparently called “interest cycling” in hobbies and other leisure-time activities:
An article from a late 1950s issue of Model Railroader magazine showing a very small HO scale layout plan. The author later admitted that it’s really too small to do much with after it’s built — without some expansion — but the building can take more time than you might expect and you’d need to develop some new skills to do it properly.
Something many ADHD people do — and maybe others, I don’t know — is what I call “interest cycling”.
Basically, I get insanely hyperfocused on one thing, devoting almost all of my time to this One Thing for weeks at a time, then suddenly stop for whatever reason and then jump onto something else.
As a result, I never become truly great at anything. What’s more, since many of these areas of hyperfocus — one article called them obsessions, and with plenty of cause — require money, I end up needing to spend large quantities of money that I really can’t afford to spend.
But, it’s a need.
And it’s a problem. For a lot of us.
See, I have obligations that surround some of my interests. I’m a group leader for the local chapter of an organization I’m part of, for example, that requires not just me to teach a class once per week, but also to advance my own knowledge.
I still teach the class because others are counting on me to do so, but I haven’t been devoting much time to the rest of it, and I should since there are some tangential benefits to what I’m trying to accomplish here at The Knighton Experiment. Sure, some of it isn’t, but that’s just part of the game, so to speak.
What’s worse is that, so far as I’ve been able to find, there aren’t a lot of ways to combat this.
Which suggests that I’m kind of doomed to go through this cycle for the rest of my life.
Now, there are upsides. I mean, there aren’t many people who could detail both how to build a chest of drawers and a 14th-century transitional plate harness, for example. While I can’t necessarily build either with a high degree of proficiency, I at least know what’s involved.
In my own case, those sound like perfectly normal interests — I share both of them — although since my income dropped precipitously several years ago, I don’t spend money as Tom still does. What I have done, however, is to accumulate future stocks of books on those topics I typically cycle through over time so that when the urge strikes I can at least ameliorate some of the need by reading about rather than actively engaging in the hobby/interest/activity. That might be the difference between Tom’s concern and my experience … I cycle among a number of interests, but not brand new ones all the time.
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November 28, 2022
“People really don’t like being told what to do”
I feel this way myself when unsolicited advice comes my way from various quarters, so Rob Henderson‘s unsolicited advice here is interesting:
Why do people react this way to unsolicited advice? After all, from the perspective of the giver, it usually comes from a place of genuine concern and desire to help.
In some cases, unsolicited advice can be thinly veiled assertions of dominance, one-upmanship, or distrust.
When some people say, “Here’s what you should do” sometimes what they really mean is “I’m better than you because I know this piece of information”. They aren’t necessarily cognizant that this is their goal, but they feel a sense of pleasure when others accept their suggestion. Unsolicited advice-giving can be a form of vying for dominance under the guise of being helpful. People resist it.
This is why advice giving can sometimes turn into a game of Why Don’t You — Yes But.
The advice giver says “Here is something I know that you don’t” and the listener says “Yeah, well here’s something I know that you don’t”.
Listeners unconsciously sense that dominance is the goal of the unsolicited advice-giver. And then feel resentment toward them. This feeling of resisting dominance might surface in the listener’s mind as something like, “Why is this person trying to tell me what to do?” Again, this is particularly likely to be the case when the listener views the unsolicited advice-giver as someone of equal or lower social rank to themselves.
This gets to the key reason why we dislike unsolicited advice: Our desire to retain our freedom.
As I’ve written about here and here, anthropological and sociological evidence indicates that generally speaking, people detest constraints on their freedom. Hunter-gatherer communities hate all forms of dominance. Hunter-gatherers generally believe it is wrong to coerce a person into doing what the person doesn’t want to do. They seldom even make direct suggestions, because it might sound like coercion.
Interestingly, though, despite having no formal legal penalties for misconduct, gossip and the possibility of reputation destruction still give rise to strict behavioral norms for these small-scale societies. Nevertheless, any attempt by another member of the community to exert dominance is usually met with swift mocking, disapproval, laughter, and, in extreme cases, ostracism or execution. Perhaps people can accept abstract rules in the form of local norms and legal codes. But if it has a human face, if an individual directly tries to tell us what to do, we are naturally inclined to resent it.
The psychologist Peter Gray has suggested that people seem to resent unsolicited advice more when it comes from loved ones. When strangers give us unsolicited advice, it doesn’t feel like a constraint on our autonomy, because we don’t care about pleasing them. But when loved ones give advice, it often does feel like a constraint, because we don’t want to upset them by ignoring their counsel.
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September 3, 2022
Theodore Dalrymple on snobbery
In the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers the various forms of snobbery:
“Snob” by Oldmaison is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Snobbery is the feeling of social superiority on the grounds of some quality over which the person believed to be inferior has little or no personal control, such as birthplace or parenthood. If this feeling is conspicuously displayed rather than merely felt, it is likely to provoke furious resentment, far more so than actual injustice. Disdain causes the rawest of wounds, which seldom heal. That is why people who triumph over snobbery in practice nevertheless often retain within themselves a strong core of resentment toward those of the type (not necessarily the actual individuals) who formerly disdained them. And this resentment often impels them to do seemingly self-destructive things.
In human affairs, it is seldom that there are clear-cut boundaries, so that it is not surprising that snobbery can shade into justified disdain or condemnation, at least for certain kinds of behavior if not for the human beings who display it. Those kinds of behavior are not equally distributed in all social groups, so that it is easy to transfer the disdain from the behavior to the social group itself, and assume that a member of that group will, ex officio, behave in the reprehended fashion.
It is probable that intellectual and aesthetic snobbery are now more prevalent than the more traditional forms that attach to place of birth and parentage. Many of us are appalled by the tastes and interests of others and secretly, and not so secretly, congratulate ourselves on our superiority to them. I am far from immune myself from such feelings. I have to control myself not so much in my outer behavior—that is a relatively easy thing to do — but in my inner feeling, that is to say to limit my own feelings of superiority to the people whose tastes I despise. After all, there is more to people than their tastes or enthusiasms, and I have never talked to anybody who struck me as anything other than an individual. Just as we are enjoined to hate the sin but not the sinner, so we have to try to dislike the bad taste but not the person who displays it. This requires the overriding of emotion by conscious thought and self-control.
The fear of appearing snobbish also has its deformations, as does inverted snobbery. The latter is harmful because it undermines aspiration to anything better or higher than that which the inverted snob already knows or likes. Inverted snobs sneer at what they sense instinctively to be above them, calling it pretentious and elitist. Incidentally, the word elitist is often misused or elided with social exclusivity. Not even the most anti-elitist of persons objects to the elitist selection of sports teams on the basis of superior performance and ability of players, nor does anyone object to being operated on by the best surgeon available, so that only if sport, and to a lesser extent surgery, is of such importance that it is an exception to the necessary suppression of elitism can this exception be justified.
Fear of appearing snobbish is harmful because it threatens the willingness to make judgments between the better and worse; and since the worse is always easier to produce, it contributes to a general decline in the quality of whatever is produced. This fear of appearing snobbish and therefore undemocratic is now very strong and pervades even universities (so I am told), in which one might have supposed that elitism, in the sense of a striving for the best that has been said and thought, would be de rigueur.
One of the forms that snobbery now commonly takes is disdain of simple, repetitive, and unskilled jobs (which are generally ill-paid as well). The educated can imagine no worse fate than to be employed in such a job, no matter how necessary or socially useful it might be — the person at the supermarket checkout (increasingly redundant, of course) being the emblematic example. With a singular lack of imagination and sense of reality about their fellow creatures, they simply put themselves in the place of these people and imagine thereby that they are being empathic. But of course there are people for whom such jobs are not unpleasant and are even rewarding. Not everyone wants to be, or is capable of being, a master of the universe.
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October 25, 2021
QotD: Individual tastes
Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur, 2004.
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April 17, 2021
Can you build a Starter Set Model Kit using ONLY the included paints and glue?
Model Minutes
Published 10 Dec 2020Quite often I get asked if you can build a Starter Set Model Kit using ONLY the included paints and glue? Well, why not? What would it actually look like? I feel like there might be a bit of a CHALLENGE coming on …
Join me in this video as I build (and review) the Airfix Messerschmitt Bf109E-3 plastic model kit in 1/72 scale which comes as part of a starter set — with glue, paint and brush included. I will be building this kit with only these products to see how it turns out.
Unboxing review of this kit:
https://youtu.be/NWHsWtxot_cPlease consider pledging your support to help keep the channel growing from strength to strength. Find out what’s in-store and how to unlock additional perks here: https://www.patreon.com/modelminutes
If you like what I do, why not buy me a coffee over at http://ko-fi.com/modelminutes
Come join the live conversation over at Discord, chat to other modellers in real time! https://discord.gg/JP4tk2n
If you want to buy any of the kits I’ve built or recommend — take a look here (it helps support the channel):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modelmi…Let’s get social!
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https://www.instagram.com/modelminutes/This video is intended for adult scale model enthusiasts.
Model Minutes holds no responsibility for any accidents, damage or injury that could occur as a result of attempting to replicate any steps depicted in this video.
All music used from the YouTube Audio Library.
#Airfix #Model #Modelkit #starterset #scale #bf109
From the comments:
Model Minutes
4 days ago
Before you leave a comment about thinning the paint or using extra tools/products, read this:I don’t think a lot of people watching this one quite “got” what I was going for here. My aim (if it wasn’t clear) was to see how good I could make this model kit using only the included products and a knife. I gave myself really strict rules to follow in an attempt to get a “best case” model out of a “worst case” situation.
Many people seem to think that beginners would instantly know that they are supposed to thin their paints, sand the plastic, fill the gaps, use extra brushes … and if, as a beginner you knew that, then you were so fortunate!
But this video is for those of us (me included) who knew nothing about model building, had no one to help us and nothing to look to for reference. When I started, YouTube didn’t exist (the internet wasn’t really a thing for me growing up either) and if I wanted to read up about modelling it meant buying magazines and looking for the information.
My build in this video is a throwback to my early days, where I built what I wanted, how I wanted, and usually with only what I had, could borrow, recycle or afford with my small amount of pocket money.
Ultimately though, I think the point of this build and video has been missed by some.
It’s meant to be fun, a light and entertaining look at our hobby. After all, isn’t this hobby supposed to be fun anyway?
I’d also like to think that some beginners out there see this one and realise that you don’t have to build a model kit with all these extra things that so many youtubers use these days. Although it’s good to have aspirations I think it’s unrealistic and can put newcomers off. If my video encourages just one new person to start building, then that’s a success right? We should be encouraging new members to the hobby because it’s in our interest too! If you agree, send someone this video and encourage them to start!
TLDR: I made this video for entertainment. It’s not a tutorial. I added extra restrictions because otherwise it wouldn’t be a “challenge” — it would be a normal build video.
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December 4, 2020
5 strange Canadian objects
J.J. McCullough
Published 22 Jul 2017Let’s take a look at a couple of weird things only Canadians will understand.
O Canada ending music care of SuperNIntendoGameboy, check out full version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0qmP…
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September 12, 2020
QotD: A toast, of sorts
With a lance and a musket and a Roman spear
To all of the men who have stood with no fear
In the service of the King“The Card Cheat” by The Clash (written by Topper Headon, Mick Jones, Joe Strummer, and Paul Simonon)
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September 5, 2020
QotD: Teenage girls
R. Sherman commenting at DavidThompson.com, 2018-06-05.
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May 13, 2020
QotD: Compliments
Megan McArdle, “After 45 Birthdays, Here Are ’12 Rules for Life'”, Bloomberg View, 2018-01-30.
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May 11, 2020
“I’m so old, I don’t even buy green bananas anymore”
While I’m not quite at Kim du Toit‘s advanced age, I have had a few intimations of mortality over the last few years that do force a certain amount of introspection:
The other day I made reference to the fact that I would be unlikely to be flying anywhere in 2020, and might only do so in late 2021 — and for the first time in my life, I said to myself, “… should I live that long.”
I think the most depressing thing about getting old is that you get wary of making long-term plans — the old joke “I’m so old, I don’t even buy green bananas anymore” is a perfect example — and it can be depressing.
It doesn’t have to be, of course. A friend of my own vintage recently embarked on a business venture which involves a massive construction project, and when I asked him when the whole thing will be finished, he said airily, “About fifteen or twenty years’ time.” If that is true, he would be around eighty years old at completion date.
I’m not sure I would do anything like that. At the same time, I’m still buying green bananas, so to speak, so there’s that.
At some point in a person’s life, you become resigned to the fact that you’ll never climb Everest, or race at Monaco, or make a billion dollars, or sleep with some famous beauty (maybe because she just died). Those are the big dreams, of course, and mostly — realistically, even — just pipe dreams. Still, their disappearance is a little of a jolt; which is probably a preparation for a much bigger disappointment when you realize that your age precludes you from doing something that you did only little while ago. As an example, I’m most likely never going to be able to go deer-stalking in Scotland with Mr. Free Market, Doc Russia and Combat Controller again, because the trudging over the uneven ground of the Cairngorm Mountains is, to put it mildly, unthinkable. I made a joke about that with the guys during a telemeeting, the other day, and said that if I were to do it again, I would only ever shoot at a distance no further than 50 yards away from the Land Rover — i.e. close to the road — whereupon Mr. Free Market said bluntly, “Then you’re never going to take another shot” (because most of the stalks now involve a prospect of a mile or two’s scrambling before the deer even come within a respectable shooting distance, assuming they haven’t moved in the interim).
So goodbye to all that, then.
It’s even more poignant when you think of your approaching end with regards to family and friends, especially family. New Wife’s elder son has given her a grandson; my own kids’ prospect of doing the same is becoming more and more remote with each year. That, actually, doesn’t bother me too much as I’ve never been one of those parents who pushes their kids to provide grandchildren — in fact, I specifically told mine that I would never push them that way, and I’ve kept my promise. But it also means that I’ll never be able to do the grandfather things with grandsons that my own grandpa did with me, and that’s a little sad.
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April 2, 2020
QotD: “To translate is to betray a little”
Although I had studied French and English and German, the translations I’d done so far were of the “I took the pen of my neighbor” variety. I thought the class would teach me to smooth out the sentence to “I took my neighbor’s pen” and that would be that.
I was wrong. Oh, it taught that also, but that was a minor portion of it. The class mostly hinged on the moral, ethical and — most of all — professional dilemmas of being a translator. I know any number of you are translators, formal or informal, but any number of you are also not. So, for the ones who are not, let me break the news with my usual gentleness:
There is no such thing as translation.
The French have a proverb “to translate is to betray a little” — or at least that’s the closest meaning in English. It’s fairly close to the true meaning, but slightly askew, of course. Every language is slightly askew to other languages.
The idea that there exists in every language a word that is exactly the equivalent of other languages is sort of like assuming that aliens will — of course — live in houses, go to school, ride buses, understand Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.
Language is how we organize our thoughts, and each word, no matter how simple, carries with it the cultural freight and experience of the specific language. Oh, “mother” will generally mean “the one who gave birth to” — except for some tribal, insular cultures where it might mean “the one who calls me by her name” or “my father’s principal wife” — but the “feel” behind it will be different, depending on the images associated with “mother” in the culture.
So, when you translate, you’re actually performing a function as a bridge. Translation is not the straightforward affair it seems to be but a dialogue between the original language and the language you translate into. If you’re lucky, you meet halfway. Sometimes that’s not possible, and you feel really guilty about “lying” to the people receiving the translation. When on top of language you need to integrate different cultures and living systems (which you do when translating anything even an ad) you feel even more guilty, because you’re going to betray, no matter how much you try. At one point, a while back, I had my dad on one phone, my husband on the other, and I was doing rapid-fire translation about a relatively straight forward matter. And even that caused me pangs in conscience, because my dad simply doesn’t understand how things are done here. I had to approach his experience and explain our experience in a way he wouldn’t think I was insane or explaining badly. That meant a thousand minor lies.
Sarah Hoyt, “Betraying A Little – A Blast From The Past From June 2011”, According to Hoyt, 2018-01-09.
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March 19, 2020
“Millennial[s are] every bit as shallow, irresponsible, stupid, and smart-assed as” Baby Boomers
David Warren on the awful discovery that the kids not only aren’t all right, they’re just as bad as we are:
Unlike certain oldies, I have retained some awareness of the “young people.” Curiosity alone would drive me to this, although childbearing (not by me personally) has had the same effect. In my research, I have found the so-called Millennial generation to be every bit as shallow, irresponsible, stupid, and smart-assed as my own, and what is worse, younger. I thought we were the Peter-Pan generation that would never grow up, but the claim must now be shared with successive rounds of offspring. To be fair, the rewards for growing up have been sharply curtailed, through that part of history which anyone remembers, and those who never tried were never punished.
History itself has now so far receded — it certainly is not taught in schools — that by now the kids persist on pure theory. They do what seems necessary to them, in the absence of knowledge. I cannot reasonably blame them for lacking what they’ve never come in contact with, for no one can know about what he has never heard of. On religious questions, for example, what could “transubstantiation” mean? It was easier to explain this to a South Sea Islander, in the good old days of the missionaries, before the islanders got cell phones.
On the other hand, the Millennials are human. The instinct to be human, even when repressed, often returns. Several times I have been moved, almost to tears, by a native decency suddenly expressed, by the most unlikely subject in rings and tattoos. There will always be something to work with, there.
While Millennials appear even dumber than their elders, we must allow for the progressive slide. There are just as many smart people as there once were, and some abroad have benefited from improved nutrition. If caught young, and exposed to learning, they would learn. They simply haven’t been exposed to it yet.
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